Multicultural Education

“He added that these institutions have largely been successful producers of teachers attuned to diverse students’ needs because multicultural education is “well-embedded” in the curriculum, teacher candidates have time to reflect and acknowledge their biases and a range of student experiences are reflected as opposed to just one class focusing on cultural competency in the classroom.”

Schools of education are increasingly prioritizing efforts to diversify the teacher workforce, but they can do a better job preparing teacher candidates to be culturally competent and effective instructors, particularly for students in diverse schools and communities, according to a new report this week from Bellwether Education Partners.

Justin Trinidad

The report “Preparing Teachers for Diverse Schools: Lessons from Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs)” highlights MSIs as historic models for how teacher preparation programs can facilitate meaningful interactions between candidates, students and educators of color through fieldwork, exposure to diverse settings and perspectives in course readings and cultivated relationships with families, school districts and community organizations, among other efforts.

“There’s so much to learn from minority serving institutions” that have a social justice and equity-oriented mission to provide a high-quality education to their underserved students, said Justin Trinidad, an analyst on Bellwether Education Partners’ Policy and Evaluation Team.

He added that these institutions have largely been successful producers of teachers attuned to diverse students’ needs because multicultural education is “well-embedded” in the curriculum, teacher candidates have time to reflect and acknowledge their biases and a range of student experiences are reflected as opposed to just one class focusing on cultural competency in the classroom.

Bellwether Education Partners’ report was developed after Trinidad and senior analyst Max Marchitello conducted a literature review and interviews with nearly 20 experts and teacher practitioners–mostly from MSIs. It comes as nearly 80 percent of the teacher workforce is White, despite the majority of students being students of color.

The consequences of this “cultural mismatch” can lead to lower expectations for students of color, negative attitudes about students and their families and the belief that it is students’ fault for their difficulties rather than social, economic and structural inequalities, the report emphasized.

One of the main reasons there has been a lack of integration of cultural experiences into the curriculum of many schools of education in recent years is because of the lack of diversity in preparation programs’ leadership, Trinidad said.

“It’s really hard to ensure that diverse perspectives are included when those implementing curriculum and those in power are not necessarily diverse themselves,” he said.

Increasing faculty and teacher candidate diversity is a recommendation the report offers as a more diverse faculty body at a school of education may encourage more candidates of color to apply and help retain them when through their matriculation. Even so, it is “crucial” that preparation programs do not overburden teacher candidates of color with “unnecessary responsibility” to help White peers grapple with their identities, stereotypes and biases, the report warned.

Institutions should also conduct a comprehensive curriculum review to identify the cultural perspectives that are missing, and then integrate additional perspectives on educational theory, pedagogy and practice, the report added. Providing ongoing training on diversity, equity and inclusion to teacher preparation faculty will assist in efforts to help them incorporate what they learn into the classroom and programs.

Exposing candidates to rural and urban schools, in addition to giving them opportunities to work with English language learners or students with learning disabilities is critical, too, the report said, noting that “experience is the best teacher.”

“But the research is clear that for these efforts to be successful, teacher candidates need to receive ongoing guidance as they reflect on their experiences,” the report said. “This can include facilitated discussions, journaling and affinity groups, among other initiatives.”

The report includes a case study on Rowan University’s College of Education and the institution’s prioritization of community perspectives and needs–another recommendation of the report. Trinidad said Rowan has done a “great job” hosting town hall meetings throughout New Jersey and engaging families and community leaders around how the college prepares teacher candidates to effectively serve students in the community.

Partnerships with school districts can similarly include opportunities for student teaching or shadowing, or the development of a teacher-in-residency program such as the one at Arizona State University, Trinidad said.

The list of recommendations the report offers is not exhaustive, and the implementation of promising practices is dependent on institutional context, Trinidad said.

“We would really like people to see this as a starting point and then invest research into some of the questions that are left unanswered, and to continue building off of a piece of the foundation that we’ve been able to contribute to the sector from this paper,” he said.

Tiffany Pennamon can be reached at tpennamon@diverseeducation.com. You can follow her on Twitter @tiffanypennamon.

The USC Rossier School of Education created Speak Up: Opening A Dialogue with Youth About Racismas a resource to help facilitate discussions about identity, inequality, and education for children of color. In the resource, you’ll find six interactive graphs demonstrating the disparities black and brown children face in the world around them, which make it difficult for them to excel in the classroom. In addition, this resource acknowledges the uncertainty some teachers may face when trying to address race in the classroom and highlights four key things teachers should do when beginning this important conversation.

James Albert Banks is an educator who has been called the “father of multicultural education,” a discipline that seeks to develop awareness and skills in teachers and students for living in a culturally diverse United States and world. Growing up as an African-American youth in the Arkansas Delta during the Jim Crow years, Banks developed a commitment to social justice. Banks became the first black professor in the College of Education at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle and is also founding director of UW’s Center for Multicultural Education.James Banks was born on September 24, 1941, near Marianna (Lee County) to Matthew Banks and Lula Holt Banks, both farmers. His formal education began at the McCullough Union School, which he walked five miles to attend. During his second year of schooling, rural schools consolidated, and he was bused to the Newsome Training School in Aubrey (Lee County), where he attended elementary and junior high school between 1948 and 1957. He graduated in 1960 from the Robert Russa Moton High School in Marianna, located about ten miles from his home.Banks obtained his associate’s degree with high scholastic honors from Chicago City Junior College in 1963. The following year, he received his bachelor’s degree in elementary education and social science with honors from Chicago Teachers College (now Chicago State University), and between 1966 and 1969, he received his master’s and PhD degrees in these fields from Michigan State University. Banks taught at Forrest Park School in Joliet, Illinois, and at the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago between 1965 and 1966.Banks married Cherry A. McGee on February 15, 1969; she is also a college professor and author. The two have written several books and articles together, and they have two daughters.Banks joined the faculty of the UW College of Education in 1969. He served as assistant professor and associate professor until 1971 and 1973, respectively, becoming a full professor in 1973. In 1992, Banks founded the Center for Multicultural Education at the university and became its director. He continues in this capacity. Banks was named Russell F. Stark University Professor in 2000 and then Kerry and Linda Killinger Professor of Diversity Studies in 2006.During his childhood, Banks felt that the images of happy slaves in his social studies textbooks were a contradiction to the stark reality of racial segregation that he and his community experienced, and he began asking who created the images of happy slaves, and who develops curriculum. These became crucial social justice research questions. In time, they have taken newer forms. Through his teaching, research, and writings, Banks has continually tried to explain issues in black studies, ethnic studies, multiethnic studies, multicultural education, and citizenship education.The demographics of the United States and its schools have been rapidly changing. This being the case, in more than four decades of research, Banks has created a fund of knowledge—dimensions, approaches, paradigms, principles of curriculum, teaching, and assessment—for curriculum developers and educators, all aimed at helping students from diverse ethnic, language, and other cultural groups to develop knowledge, attitudes, and skills to become effective citizens in a multicultural nation and a diverse world. Stated simply, Banks has provided teachers with detailed answers as to what to teach, how to teach, and how to assess students from different ethnic groups such as Native American, African American, European American, Hispanic American, Asian American, and Arab American, and other cultural categories such as gender. Banks has emphasized that textbooks must not merely describe concepts from the perspective of the dominant culture. Rather, they must also include viewpoints of different cultural groups. For example, in explaining westward expansion, it is imperative that textbooks include the perspectives of Native Americans. Teachers have a responsibility to reduce prejudice and empower “all” students with the goal of creating a just society.Banks has authored or edited more than twenty books, as well as over sixty book chapters and written about 100 journal articles. Banks is editor of two landmark publications, Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education (1995, second edition 2004) and Diversity and Citizenship Education: Global Perspectives (2004). He also edits a multicultural education book series published by Teachers College Press at Columbia University.In 1971, Banks was appointed a member of the Task Force to Reevaluate Social Science Textbooks in California. He visited Hawaii, Mexico, Puerto Rico, France, and Great Britain to examine multiethnic education during the 1976–77 school year. In 2000, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Education. Banks was president of the National Council for the Social Studies (1982) and the American Educational Research Association (1997–1998). He has received honorary doctorates from six colleges and universities, as well as the UCLA Medal.Banks was the twenty-ninth annual faculty lecturer at the University of Washington in 2004–05, the university’s highest honor for a faculty member. In 2004, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) awarded its first Social Justice in Education Award to Banks for a career of research that advances social justice through education research. In the fall of 2007, he was the Tisch Distinguished Visiting Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York. In January 2019, he retired from the University of Washington.

For additional information:Banks, James A. Race, Culture, and Education: The Selected Works of James A. Banks. New York: Routledge, 2006.Brown, Quinn Russell. “Thanks, Professor Banks: ‘The Father of Multicultural Education’ Is Retiring after 50 Years at UW.” Columns: The University of Washington Alumni Magazine.

The fact remains that our nations were here before any
Europeans came??, says David Treuer.

By LILY ROTHMAN

January 24, 2019

Lily Rothman is a senior editor at TIME

When the Ojibwe writer David Treuer was growing up, he says,
there were a few things that showed up in every Indian household he would
visit: a Sears catalog, a Bible, a picture of John F. Kennedy and a copy of the
book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown’s influential chronicling of
19th-century Native American history. But the contents of that book, famous as
it was, proved complicated for him. The story it told was one that clashed, in
important ways, with his own lived experience of reservation life and Native
culture.

Americans of all backgrounds have recently had cause to
revisit the place of Native Americans within national life. President Trump has
invoked the terror of Wounded Knee to make fun of Senator Elizabeth Warren and
a heightened dialogue continues over a stand-off between Covington Catholic
student Nicholas Sandmann and Omaha elder Nathan Phillips on the National Mall
last Saturday. But from Treuer’s perspective, thanks to centuries of history —
and that famous book — many people are going about that thinking all wrong.

He spoke to TIME about Warren, the problem with tragic
storytelling and his new book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America
From 1890 to the Present.

You describe your book as a “counternarrative” to the 1970
history Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. What was your reaction the first time
you read it?

It was in every Indian household, but I didn’t read it until
college. I remember feeling both applauded and eradicated. It tries to draw
attention to a legacy of injustice, but on the other hand it says the massacre
at Wounded Knee in 1890 was the point at which Indian culture and civilization
died, period. I remember reading that as a student at Princeton, far from home,
missing my tribe and thinking how preposterous it was.

You write that Indians “get ourselves wrong” in that sense,
too — did you have an “aha moment” when you realized that?

I don’t know that there’s one. Growing up, my reservation
was something to escape and I felt that way I think because I bought the story
and I assumed the role of the sufferer. It was only when I was removed from it
that I had a chance to look back at the place I was from and recognize that
Leech Lake Reservation, my home, wasn’t simply where good ideas go to die, that
there’s a richness and complexity to our lives that I hadn’t previously
noticed.

What went into the decision to mix new reportage in with the
history you’re recounting?

Since this book is not about Indian death, it’s about Indian
life, I knew I had to talk to Native people in the act of living. I also felt
strongly that I couldn’t ask them to share unless I was going to take a
corresponding journey. It didn’t feel fair to hang people up and hide behind
them.

Was there a specific misconception you most wanted to set
right?

I was most interested to wean ourselves from the tragic
mode. Tragedy in the Aristotelian sense is a story that elicits strong emotions
and which leads to a moment of catharsis. That kind of narrative doesn’t serve
us. People get to read and then feel like they’ve done some sort of social
good. I guess I’m too much of a professor to relinquish the notion that the way
we tell stories shapes what we see. The word shapes the world. If we only focus
on the tragic past we’ll only see a tragic future. If we can use a different
kind of storytelling method, if we can imagine ourselves differently, then we
can be differently.

You make the case for defining Indian identity by
relationship to culture, so what did you think of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s
choice to take a DNA test?

I can understand the drive to want to put the issue to rest,
but it didn’t put it to rest. Frankly what’s most interesting about Warren are
her economic policies. Those are worth talking about. The fact that she grew up
in Oklahoma hearing she was Native, that just makes her Oklahoman. She took a
test, and it proved that she heard stories that were largely true. So what? The
only reason it’s a story is because we’re continuing to bite the baited hook.

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Your father was Jewish, a Holocaust survivor who came to
tribal life from the outside. What perspective did he offer on these issues of
identity?

He considered himself Jewish only insofar as he was
persecuted. Their religion was socialism, not Judaism, in Vienna in his youth.
And yet the experience of the Holocaust for them and the losses that they
endured as a result of it made them keenly aware of their heritage and
sharpened my father’s perception of where he came from. When he finally did
come to the reservation, he described it as feeling like coming home after a
lifetime of exile. It felt very comfortable.

That’s the tricky thing. Identities are always constructed,
multiple and overlapping. Those are largely consciously made by us. Cultures,
not so much. Culture is an inherited matrix of understandings and impulses and
rules, like grammar. I always think about, in relation to both those things,
Karl Marx’s quote where he says that all men make history but they don’t always
make it as they please. That’s always good to imagine. We’re stuck making
history with what we have.

You describe how we got to a place where Indians are fully
American but also treated differently by the law. How does one balance that
right to be different with a hope for being equal?

We don’t simply want equal rights—although we do want those,
because we’re American citizens. It’s that and a recognition that we belong to
sovereign nations which exist inside of the sovereign nation of the United
States. [Other people] hear that we operate casinos or we have different laws
regarding our rights to hunt and fish in our tribal lands, things like that,
and often think of them as special rights bestowed upon us in payment for poor
treatment. The fact remains that our nations were here before any Europeans
came. What we have are the unbroken remnants of preexisting nations around
which America has built itself. We have always reserved the right to form our
own government and make our own laws. We gave people permission to settle here
in exchange for recognition of our tribal sovereignty. If that troubles people,
they can move.

Is full equality possible under those conditions?

Yes, and civil rights are important, but it’s the and, not
the or. In that our struggle is like that of many Americans. Those things
remain for many of us out of reach.

A lot of the power and rights that Indians do have now you
trace to the period when the federal government forced Indian children into
boarding schools, and how that brought people together. What’s it like to push
back against the dominant narrative that that separation of families was solely
harmful?

I’m probably only truly comfortable when I’m pushing back
against a dominant narrative, but it was tricky. It would have been so easy for
me continue to point out the ways in which the federal government tried to
destroy us. My anger, my indignation, my hurt are real. My grandmother was
taken from her mother when she was 4 years old and didn’t return till she was
10. She didn’t know what it was like to have a mother and it flavored her
relationship with my own mother when she was a girl and in turn it flavored my
relationship with my mother. That of course encourages me to point a finger
back at the government and say, You did this. It’s harder to say, O.K., but
what else happened? What did we do in response? Although those schools were
intended to destroy Indian tribes by destroying Indian families, they resulted
in a vast network of informed, healthy, strong relationships between previously
atomized individuals. Those relationships were paramount in the efforts in the
’40s and ’50s to establish strong tribal governments, among other things.

What do you hope activists learn from the work of the
American Indian Movement in the ’60s and ’70s, or from the more recent protests
at Standing Rock?

They’re already doing it. I see protests the protests that
continue to go on in Minnesota around pipelines, and I’m incredibly impressed.
They’re such good students of history. They’re at the front line not just of
Native protests but of a larger protest that highlights the fact that the
struggle isn’t between pipelines and Indians, it’s between private enterprise
and the common good.

After the recent Indigenous Peoples March in Washington,
D.C., video of young men in MAGA hats surrounding an Omaha elder became a focus
of controversy. Is there a lesson people can take away from the way that moment
went viral?

The surface is ugly, but the depths are profound. We could
focus on [the elder] Nathan Phillips. Despite what he’s been through—and I’m
imagining it’s been a lot—with dignity and compassion and gentleness even, he
stayed in the fight. In his example, I see a lot of what I was trying to
communicate in the book: the ways in which Indians have not only endured
America but endeavored always to make it better.

This past fall saw the election of the first two Native
American Congresswomen, but also a Supreme Court ruling against the Standing
Rock Sioux in a voter-ID-law case. What’s your outlook on Native participation
in government?

The fight continues. What can I say?

A version of this interview, which has been edited and condensed, appears in the Feb. 4, 2019, issue of TIME